The good, the gentle, and the brave.

The world, it is said, offers life to the very good, the very gentle and the very brave. Perhaps, Yuriy Glodan is very good, perhaps he is very gentle, but now the world asks of him, if he will be brave? And if he cannot find bravery, this world will try to break him. And if it cannot break him, it will kill him.

That is the world in which Yuriy Glodan, from Odesa, Ukraine, lives. It is likely that few that read this will know Yuri Glodan. I do not know him.

But what I do know is Yuriy Glodan defied the circumstances of his life in the country in which he lives, Ukraine, a country at war, and went out. He went out not to fight,?but to go to the shops.

That one act changed his life – to do one act, that at any other time should have been banal in its simplicity – a mundane part of everyday family life. He went to the shops.?Yet, on one day recently, his trip to the shops changed his life indelibly, undefinably, and irreversibly.

On that day, a cool northerly breeze met the city of Odesa. Odesa, a port city that sits in age-old defiance on the shores of the Black Sea. It is a proud city of history and beauty; or at least it should be had war, yet again, not arrived.

Yuryi Glodan heard the news of the explosion while he was at the shops. The smoke of the missile attack gave away the first sign of the tragedy that unfolded before him as he raced back to his block of flats and screamed at the police to let him inside the burning building. On reaching his flat he found the body of his wife Valeria, her mother and, after a long search, the body of his three-month-old baby Kira.

Killing children, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “is just a new national idea of the Russian Federation." Then, thinking about Kira asked, “What threat was she?”

It is impossible to know what Yuriy Glodan thinks of himself in terms of being good, or gentle, or even brave. It’s likely he is not sure of the answer either. But then, there are already too many tragedies like that of Yuriy, Valeria, Valeria's mother and little Kira, and they are not limited to Ukraine.

While Yuriy Glodan searched through the rubble of his home to find amongst the shattered fragments of his home the bodies of his wife, mother-in-law and daughter, similar stories were unfolding in Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Pakistan, Ethiopia and more cities and countries well beyond Ukraine. Each story involves killing countless children, countless fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers. In fact, there is scarcely a continent across which there is not uncertainty, bloodshed, unrest, or conflict.

In North America, guns kill more people than road accidents in a war on gun violence, in central America violence kills those in a war on drugs, in southeast Asia Myanmar sees its own genocide, in Afghanistan decades of religious persecution and war still kills hundreds, tension and killing in Pakistan, tension in Korea, unrest in the Pacific, unrest and war in Europe because of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and violence across the African continent.

Lost are the remarkable things young children like Kira might have experienced. Lost are the potential insights and wisdom she and others might have gained. Lost are the hopes and dreams of lives not lived, their joys, their happiest times, and their opportunity to thrive beyond adversity, to learn, to love, to live.

EVERY year in Australia and New Zealand, holding those who offered their lives so that we might find peace we say, ‘Lest we forget.’ Yet this year another generation of men, like Yuriy, women like Valeria and her mother, and children like little Kira suffer the tragedy of war, making it hard to see what lasting, tangible lessons have been learnt from the sacrifice of so many across generations. Perhaps it’s time that the pledge ‘Lest we forget’ goes further and lasts longer than the one day of the year. And at the going down of the sun and in the morning, ‘we will remember all of them,” and strive to find a way beyond war, beyond conflict, beyond the incandescent loss of life – a world for the good, the gentle, and the brave.

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